SO NOW coffee is good for you. I suppose we should be glad. But instead of being glad some of us are wondering if nutritionists and fitness experts should join economists, auctioneers and journalists in the professions' hall of shame. Yes, things are getting quite snug in here, but we can probably find some room for the lifestyle dictators, writes Anne Marie Hourihane.
Yesterday it was revealed that a British paediatrician's report on food in children's nurseries found that toddlers were getting far too much fruit and fibre, and far too little fat. Saddest of all, the children were being served portions that were too small. In other words, the poor kids are eating just like their conscientious parents - except the toddlers cannot drive to the chipper at lunch time for a secret break-out.
There is another helpless victim of the health police - our taoiseach-in-waiting, Brian Cowen. No sooner has he been anointed as our next beloved leader than he is told to hide his smoking and his drinking, neither of which is anyone's business but his own. Strange to say, hitherto innocent terms like "health" and "lifestyle" and even "private life" have become buzz words for bullying, just as our own health system, which might actually save our lives, is dying.
Now that coffee has been rehabilitated (scientists fed a high cholesterol diet to a group of unfortunate rabbits and then saved them from dementia by plying them with caffeine), we can only pray that red meat, ice cream, butter and other delicious things are to follow. Remember the nutrition pyramids that used to grace the textbooks in our schools ? They had all those lovely carbohydrates in the majority, right at the bottom of the triangle. So the wealthier half of the planet hurled itself into a mountain of pizza dough and pasta and sugar substitutes. And now that we are all far too fat the nutritionists, brazen enough for a bunch of psychics, have changed their minds.
There is a good scene in the Woody Allen film Sleeper where Diane Keaton says that she's going off to have a steak and a cigarette. Both she and Allen have a little laugh about the bad old days when people believed that steaks and cigarettes were actually bad for you. At the time - 1973 - this was a satire on the health nazis, but the joke about steaks (not cigarettes, we'll get to that in a minute) has turned out to be the truth, just when we've waded our way through enough brown rice to feel stupid. After years of telling us to eat pasta and to eschew the humble egg, the nutritionists have performed a U-turn and are sending us back to animal protein again.
It would not matter that the food we eat, and the science which supposedly supports our choices about it, was as susceptible to fashion crazes as a bunch of teenagers on Red Bull, if it did not have consequences in the real world and the pre-school nurseries. As 500 people die avoidable deaths from stroke here each year, food for the healthy is the new battleground: between parents and children, between sellers and buyers, between the so-called scientists themselves. It was a bad day for food when McDonald's started selling salads. It denotes a lack of self-belief from McDonald's and is damn confusing for the rest of us.
Health has become a virtue in itself, and anything that is deemed unhealthy (as eggs and steaks were until very recently) is therefore not just foolish, but almost morally wrong. The situation has become so ridiculous that it has become somehow infra dig to love chips, as all humans surely must, and at the same time we are terrified to go into hospital in case we catch MRSA there.
The idea that our new taoiseach should have to hide the fact that he smokes - if indeed he still does - must seem extraordinary to any adult. Cowen will forgive me if I say that he is an unlikely role model for susceptible teenagers. And the prospect of amateur sleuths chasing him around the stoops of Government Buildings on the off- chance that they'll snap him having a quick fag is a terrible one. You know, Barack Obama smokes and even his right-on campaign team - even the terrifying Mrs Obama - have not succeeded in making him quit. Smokers are a defiant and nervy lot, I seem to remember.
On the drink issue we have to say the same. If unremitting sobriety stopped politicians - or any of us - from doing foolish things then the world would be a very different place. In modern times, the question of whether Ireland's beloved leader is a drinker or not is irrelevant. We've never had the nuclear deterrent, which is just as well, because Cowen's mates would have privatised it.
What are they going to do next to the poor guy - put him on a diet? Take him off red meat? Feed him snow peas? Bombard him with quinoa? Solidarity, Mr Cowen. Don't let them grind you down. If you can revive our health service we won't care what you do in your spare time.